Berlin: Gloomy day, fun night.

Sorry this took so long. I'm sure you've all been waiting with baited breath.

Thursday December 20th: We all woke up and decided that we should buy some snacks before heading off for the day's events. After finding a little grocery store near our hostel, I bought an apple, some trail mix and a doughnut that tasted a lot like those timbits that are kind of raw in the center. Happiness thy name is uncooked dough! We took the subway to Brandenburg Tor again to catch our tour for Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. 

Although none of us had the appropriate train tickets (suck it controllers!) we left with the group. It took about 45 minutes to get out of Berlin and into the small town of Oranienburg. Creepily, we were informed that these are the same routes and train tracks many people would have taken to get to the camp when it was in use.

Work will set you free

Once at the camp, we had about a 3-4 hour tour of its entirety. Upon writing this, I wish I had written this blog a lot earlier as I seem to have forgotten much of the really interesting details. Basically Sachsenhausen was mainly a POW camp and held mostly Soviet soldiers (including Stalin's son!). Although there were also some political prisoners and some Jewish people there too. We toured the Jewish barracks, the grounds, the medical facilities, where the gas chamber once was, 'death trenches', etc... All and all an uplifting experience.

Jewish Barracks

Its odd. Although I really wanted to go, for history's sake, personal family stuff, learning in general, etc...the moment you get there, you really want to leave. I'm not one to be incredibly spiritual about things, ultimately I'm more of a cynic, but there was definitely a "vibe" you get from being there. Maybe it was because it was a colder day, maybe due to it being terribly grey and cloudy, maybe it's all mind over matter, but standing in this huge empty walled in area, you can't help but notice this great feeling of despair. We were right next to a train route, but you couldn't hear the any train. No birds, no cars, no people. Eerily silent.

Remains of the gas chamber

I highly recommend it for anyone who has the chance. I learned a great deal and was shocked by how much I really didn't know. To ease off the tension my friends and I referred to Sachsenhausen as a "baby concentration camp", as in size and importance, Sachsenhausen was quite small. Still, it made all statistics seem ridiculous. If so many atrocities happened in this one little camp, the whole picture becomes unimaginable.

Doom and gloom aside. We took the train back to Berlin and met these two very nice German guys. We talked about "How I met you mother" and " The Big Bang theory" and we all laughed when one of them asked us what "ixnay" meant. He thought it was a real word and tried to look it up in the dictionary. I had a great amount of fun explaining Pig Latin to him.

That night, we decided to go and have dinner at the Alexanderplatz christmas market. I don't really remember what I ate, except that it was delicious. Mushrooms and sausages and gravy....something like that. Listening to the music and drinking our Gluwein (mulled wine), we met a really nice group of people. Two sisters from Germany, a Spanish girl and a man from the Netherlands. We talked and drank for an hour and a bit before heading back to the hostel.

Friday the 21st- Time to leave. I wake up around 4:30, trying to be as quite as possible and not wake up my friends, and I make my way to the airport. Being told there was an express train, I desperately tried to find it. Of course I'd ask the only German person who didn't speak any English is she could help me. Through sign language, we made it work. Two hour wait and one flight later, I'm in Geneva. Woohoo! Just in time for my 3 hour wait until a train going to Grenoble shows up! Boredom, boredom, boredom, reading, reading, reading. AHA! Grenoble. 2 hour wait until my Lyon train. Print off tickets, get on train. LYON!!!! OH GOD FINALLY! I make my way to an airport hotel and go to bed.

Beyond that point is Cayda on transatlantic flight and Cayda in Canada time. So there is the conclusion of my time in Berlin!!

Fun Facts:
-The Nazis tried to ruin the British economy through inflation by printing exact copies of pound notes. (They intended on dropping them in an air raid) They never got around to doing it though.

-Even after WW2 Sachsenhausen remained open and became a Soviet camp for containing their prisoners of war. Do as I say and not as I do, eh?

-Travelling, nay, waiting to travel sucks. I honestly think I've spent at least a full day merely waiting for transportation.